"Winter" Cd cover design

So a few months ago my dad told me he was recording a new EP to be released sometime around christmas. For the past few years I have dont the artwork for all of his CD's along with doing a bit of backing singing on various tracks which is always quite hilarious! 

 My parents took a trip to Alaska and a lot of the lyrics were inspired by that, one song in particular was about sitting outside with a glass of whisky looking at the night sky. I decided this was a pretty good visual so I decided to run with that. 

I wanted the image to use flat perspective with a lot of pattern and strong shapes. Here is a bit of my research looking at fantastical Illustration and book art - the Never Ending Story cover is my favourite!

I used a thick italic fountain pen for most of my sketching. Most of my linework is usually done with thin Rotring fineliners but I wanted the drawing to be quite rough and rugged and this pen gave more of that effect.

I drew the figure on an Adirondack style chair, I sat on a lot of these chairs in my time in New York and they take me back to that feeling of being out in the countryside surrounded by trees and beautiful forest landscapes. 

I wanted to create a patterned border to frame the piece as I have always loved illustrations with borders like this but I have never tried to create one myself.

Setting up my "studio" on our kitchen table to start the final artwork.

Inking up the pencil line

Getting to the final stages

This is the finished artwork after I had added pencil shading for depth. 

For the typography I sat for an evening and ruined my wrist everything using my glass dip pen in a simple font style. It hurt but I enjoyed the effect once it was finished.

I then had to scan it all in to be digitally coloured and edited together. The final CD arrived this week yayyyy!

I used the same border and elements from the main image in the inside and reverse cover so it all linked together and I put the trees on the main CD because I liked the shapes they made (plus I love pattern so I hate empty space...). Let me know what you think of this, has anyone else done any CD art they would like to share? I will put a link to the tracks when they are online which should be soon!

Christmas Fayre Poster - Hand Drawn Type

I have seen a lot of beautiful posters about recently using hand drawn type mixed with illustration to give a more "hand made" style to the events they are advertising. This works especially well when it comes to advertising craft fayres as the whole premise behind these events is buying into hand crafted goods. I find hand drawn typography to be a lot more charming and interesting to look at than standard fonts. 

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I have wanted to make a poster like this for a while now so I jumped at the opportunity to help out a friend who is running a christmas craft fayre in Chippenham to raise money for a local charity on 21st December. Check out the event page here.

I thought I would go into a bit about my process when it comes to hand drawn type. I usually loosely sketch out a composition of what my piece of work will look like. I am no graphics/layout expert but generally just looking at the shapes of different letters and words and seeing how they fit around each other helps when working out a composition.

To come up with the different type styles I usually use dafont.com where I will look at a variety of fonts before choosing one and experimenting with drawing it out in my own style with different drawing implements. It usually ends up with the text being a hybrid of the chosen font and my own style due to the different tools I use. 

One tip I have for hand drawn type is to experiment a lot with your tools. I prefer my designs to have different line weights and textures as I think it looks richer and more interesting. This is a small selection of what I use for type:

 Left to right: Berol Italic Pen, Rotring Mechanical pencil, 3 Rotring Rapidograph pens of various weight, Graphite pencil, Graphite stick, Alex Wonder Pen (alternative to brush pens, click for how to make), Calligraphy Fountain Pen. 

Graphite sticks for example have a really great grainy texture and chunky ones can easily be manipulated to create different thicknesses of line.

These presents are drawn with 3 different thicknesses of fineliner.

For this I drew out my design roughly in the chosen fonts in pencil before going over with various types of pen/graphite pencils. Here is the scan of the finished design:

I then went into Photoshop to tweak the composition, retouch because am not the neatest of artists, and add colour and layers of texture. Here is the final result:

I enjoyed this project, hoping I can do more like this in the future! Feel free to share your own hand drawn type projects, I love to see what people are working on :)

Glass Dip Pens and Kelmscott Manor

Last wednesday I went for a day out to Kelmscott manor with my mum. Kelmscott was the home of british designer William Morris for many years, after writing my dissertation on his work I have a bit of an obsession, unfortunately you weren't allowed to take photographs inside the house but you can see some of his work from when I visited the William Morris Museum in London here.

It was a lovely sunny day so we wandered around the gardens and I got some photos of the autumn leaves - such lovely colours!

We had a timed entrance so had a look around the gift shop before we went in, you could buy almost anything in some kind of Morris print.

My mum bought me an early birthday present, a venetian glass dip pen and ink set which is absolutely beautiful! 

It holds the ink in the ridges in the glass and it flows really nicely, I haven't used ink in ages so I did a few doodles.

Shapes and flowers collection

Yay new work! 

I have been working a lot recently (at my "normal" job) but I get two half hour breaks so have been doing doodles in the staff room when I have the energy! 

I used this colour palette from my previous blog post because I like the range of different colours and wanted to branch out from always using shades of purple and blue (yes there is still purple but I pretty much never use red, yellow, or brown. shh...)

These four are based around different shapes, the two below are focused on natural forms and using the brighter colours to make the linework pop. 

I would love to know your thoughts on these and if there are any products you would like to see them on? I am thinking of making some coasters and mugs when I get the right materials in :)

Templar Publishing Paper Watch Project

Today I have been working on something for a charity project run by Templar Publishing. As part of a bid to raise £5000 for Breast Cancer Care they have asked various illustrators to decorate a paper watch to be sold at auction. 

I set about doing some sketches for ideas

I decided to add colour using some metallic embellishment pens which have a 3D effect on the paper

Before moving onto my final watch:

I added an extra bit because the flowers weren't big enough on the watch face ;) 

You can see some images of the other watches over here on their facebook page!